Yes, MORE plant monster sketches

And I felt like drawing a foot too, don't ask why.

More plant sketches

Sorry for just the sketches this week guys. I'm visiting home and I don't want to spend too much time on animation. And I really need to figure out the overall design before I can move forward. I'll probably start painting backgrounds in Corel when I get back to Brooklyn next week. Here I started roughing out the tube monsters so I can compare them to the plants to make sure they aren't too similar. Then I plopped down on the recliner and sketched while my Dad was watching an underwater sea special. I like the ones on the right for the plant monster. They seem predatory and not too complicated to animate. Don't forget you can click on the images to make them bigger.

Plant sketches

I have to start thinking about the underwater plant monster, so I sketched some ideas from plant photos online. None of these are very predatory though, and that big one in the middle looks like a pain to animate. I like the tubes at the bottom, but they may be too similar to the tube monsters that attack the first creature. I gotta do some more sketching.

Pod sketches

I googled "pods" and came up with all kinds of inspiration. Poppy pods, monkey pods, and lotus pods are all fairly close to what I'm thinking the creatures live in. I might go with a combination of a poppy pod and a lotus pod, like on the right and the bottom left. And instead of in a desert landscape like the backgrounds I did a few posts back, they'll be in a lush green forest.

Old painting

More college art! I used a non-slide-scanner to scan the slide, so it's a little fuzzy. I also edited the quicktime code for the posts below, and it now works for me in IE now. I found a great site, freevideocoding.com, that generates free html code for embedding video clips!

My PC is eating my Mac!

I just can't resist showing off my brand new Macbook and matching wacom tablet! This is what I now do the majority of my work on. Sorry about the quicktimes not working for some people. They work for me on the mac and pc, but just in Firefox, not Internet Explorer. I'll see what I can find out about this. Thanks for all your comments and advice guys!

I'm calling this guy "Buster"

I was playing around some more in Toon Boom today. The drawing tools are so much better than flash! Very different though in terms of timeline and organization.

Toonboom

First of all, thanks to Nina Paley for recommending my blog! Her work is really clever and has great timing and design. Be sure to click on her links to the right of her page.
So I sold my pc laptop to my boyfriend and bought a brand new shiny white Macbook yesterday! Now we have the best of both worlds in our apartment, and he can game while I blog. I know, we're big time nerds. Anyway, I downloaded a trial of Toonboom Studio on my new Mac and you can see the results of my first efforts in it below. It'll take some getting used to, but I really want to try to use it instead of flash. Toonboom's got way better drawing and onionskinning, along with all sorts of animation goodies. I'm still figuring stuff out and there will be features I'll miss from Flash, along with the ability to easily export gif animations. I may find another way to post the gif animations if the quicktimes don't work out.

Oh yeah, like I said, it's only a trial, hence the obnoxious toonboom logo!

It walks!

I started this walk thinking I was going to make him tiptoe away in a frightened manner. But as is so often the case when I do a walk cycle, I forget the main point of it and get caught up in just getting him from one side to the other in a somewhat appealing way. As you can see, he doesn't look very scared, in fact, he looks pretty confident. Next time I need to remember that his attitude is the most important information to convey. For a tiptoe I think I should keep him hunched over and not have his body turn from side to side so much.

Falling, falling, falling.....

Backgrounds be damned, I just want to animate!

Texture doodles

I'm really stuck on these backgrounds. That makes sense I guess, since I'm not really a designer. Here are some textures I was doodling to use in the various bgs.

Background colors

I was playing in flash and came up with these. On this top one here I just duped the tree thing - obviously if I go this way I would make more than one, and the little river wouldn't be so lame. I like the colors, but it's a little too psychodelic and a little too arid. I need to get back to the lush forest idea.

Tree pod sketches

I gotta figure out what these tree pods look like!

Tiptoe sketches

You can always click on the image to make it bigger!

The Secret of Gif

Okay, so I finally figured out that I should have been uploading the animated gifs directly to my site, then linking to them from blogger rather than uploading them through blogger. So now I can see them move, hopefully you can too. Unfortunately blogger compresses the hell out of them for the main page, but you can always click on the image to make it big and pretty. Scroll down to see animations in all their giffy glory.

Super ball sketches

Here are some sketches of what the creatures look like when they morph together.

Groovin'

Okay so I can't color and shade each animation test, it's just silly. Hopefully you'll be entertained enough by this little guy's rather dorky moves. As always, I'm totally open to suggestions!

Old sketch alert!

Sorry if you visited the site earlier and saw it was down. My domain expires on June 1 every year due to lame customer service. Yay! Here's a sketch I did awhile ago. I did it from little ceramic critters I made even longer ago, in college. Yep, I really have had these weird things in my head since then.